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I'm having a very similar problem on one of my boxes, with the same workaround.  However, it only appears to affect certain AGS games: BJ6 is broken in the same way, but Linus Bruckman works, as does the Blackwell demo.  I'm running XP without SP2.  I'll check the video card specs and post them.

Thanks for the replies folks. The hills in the background where kinda supposed to be far away, not fused with the plains where the house is. Any idea how i should make this more clear?

Try making them bluer.  Things that are far away often have a blue cast to them.

(Also, if they're supposed to be really far away, they should probably be short and sit directly on the horizon... the horizon should also be moved up a little from this angle, maybe around 20px, since the camera is looking up and over the hills.)

This is sort of the blind leading the blind here, but the boundary between the water and the sand isn't right.  For one thing, the sand should look concave with respect to the water, not convex: right now, it looks like there's a sandy hill over which you can see the lake and the mountains. Also, the boundary shouldn't be so straight (the boundary should appear more turbulent the closer this scene takes place to the water, if that makes sense).  That's also a very dry color for sand: the sand closest to the water should be wet (i.e. darker).  How much wet sand depends on whether it's an ocean with tides, or a lake, as well as how close you are to the water.

Here's one example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephaniesays/126629794/

You can find many more by searching flickr for "shore" or "shoreline."

I posted this to the BJ5 thread as well, on the off-chance that it was a scripting bug, but at the start of Day 4 in BJ5 I get the following crash:

Adventure Game Studio for Mac
An error has occured. Please contact the game author for support, as this is likely to be a scripting error and not a bug in AGS. (ACI version 2.71.872)

in Room script (line 105)

Error: SetObjectTransparent: transparency value must be between 0 and 100

Hey Grundislav,

I really like the game so far!  The level of detail is great (in particular, the animations, although there are plenty of other interesting touches, like the choice of characters in Yamamoto's office -- nice bilingual pun).

One problem for me is that it crashes with the Mac interpreter at the opening screen for Day 4, with the error:

Adventure Game Studio for Mac
An error has occured. Please contact the game author for support, as this
is likely to be a scripting error and not a bug in AGS.
(ACI version 2.71.872)

in Room script (line 105)

Error: SetObjectTransparent: transparency value must be between 0 and 100

This may just be an interpreter bug, of course.

OK, so this is definitely Yet Another Pirate Game, but... awesome graphical style!Ã,  I'd love to see a full game done this way. 

How do you feel about an auto-hide function for the options button (i.e. it only becomes visible when your mouse is above a certain level on the right, and goes away as soon as you move back into the playing area)?  I agree with the placement in the top-right, but I think having it always sitting around there is a bit distracting.

"Assassins," by Lightning Bolt.

(seriously, acquire this song.  it's excellent.)

Yeah, I think we're on the same page here -- part of the advantage of the adventure game setting is that the player can work out a lot of the backstory on her/his own.  But I don't think that means that we've exhausted the genre -- if anything, this should work to our advantage as designers.  After all, you should be able to get away with setting a game just about anywhere, as long as you give the player a rich environment to fool around in and discover things at her/his own pace (by implementing good descriptions for objects, giving NPCs convincing dialogue and motivations, etc.).

I'm probably rambling.  Does this make sense?  (maybe I shouldn't ask... haha)

Rocketgirl and esper: totally agree.  (Dunno if anyone followed the "white room" link, but apparently one psychological reason for that particular cop-out is because the writer is staring at a blank, white page, i.e. the protagonist's setting is blank because the writer hasn't written it yet.  Cute use of psychology...)

Anyway, having lots of backstory has its own problems, as you said, but exposition can definitely be done gracefully.  There are some great examples of this -- I'm thinking in particular of Trinity, whose opening lines follow:

Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin. And now, reports the BBC, rumors of a satellite blackout. It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast.

But the world will have to wait. This is the last day of your $599 London Getaway Package, and you're determined to soak up as much of that authentic English ambience as you can. So you've left the tour bus behind, ditched the camera and escaped to Hyde Park for a contemplative stroll through the Kensington Gardens.

I robbed this from The Craft Of Adventure, which is a really interesting read for anyone into game creation (although its intended audience is mostly for writers of interactive fiction, as you might have guessed).  Anyway, this is text, of course, but it would work easily well as a cut-scene or a few screens of dialog, and right away it establishes who you are (a middle-class tourist), what your motivation is (sightseeing) and what's going on (the beginning of World War III).

Narnia and Star Wars are good examples of complex worlds, but it's also true that all of us at one point were ignorant of anything about these universes, and they still managed to draw us in.  To be an active, rather than passive, participant, I think you need to know a little bit more about how things work -- however, you can also make the puzzles and the game aspect work for you, by letting the player explore the world a little, conversing with people and interacting with objects, to let her/him see how it differs from our own before things really get moving.

Thoughts?

Most of the time it's a bog-standard Monkey Island clone/stop the evil scientist/game set in the future/detective game.

I know you said this a long time ago, but I gotta chime in to back you up.  Here's a specific list of game settings that I think are played out:

Games set on an island, especially if the name of the island figures in the name of the game.  I think this extends beyond simple MI fannishness: islands are natural settings for adventure games -- sparsely populated, interesting scenery, easy to traverse in a short amount of time.  Still.  No more islands.

Games where you wake up in a strange place, not knowing who you are.  I think this is a variation on the

"white room" beginning.  (Incidentally, the link in question is a wonderful list of sci-fi cliches, geared at writers but also valuable for adventure gamers.)

Games set in sanitariums or mental institutions.  I can't put my finger on why this is so popular, but there sure seem to be a lot of them.  This might just be a channeling of a popular horror movie framework, I guess.


[/list]

I'm not much of an artist myself, but I think this one looks particularly nice, as does this one.  These are nicely composed and have a neat "vectory" feel.

I'm putting one of them as an inset:

There are still a couple of areas for improvement (what's behind those plants? the roof of the hotel also looks odd, and it seems like you should be able to see the other tires on the van if you can see below it) but overall I like this direction and I think you should continue with it.  This scene is also good for an adventure game because there are plenty of things one could interact with.

With those kinds of backgrounds you'll want to have more realistic sprites.  Just to get you started, a rule of thumb is for the height of the character to be between seven and eight times the length of the head -- so after you draw the head, put a bracket down on the side like so:

and then move the feet, waist, etc. and fill them in.  Actually, that sprite is actually pretty nice -- it has plenty of character -- but its proportions are pretty cartoony and wouldn't go with the more realistic background style you seem to be developing.  It might look a little strange at first because the eye tends to skip over blank space in favor of obvious landmarks, which is a huge reason that people tend to mess up proportion.  That's also the cause of another mistake you're making here -- the eyes are actually in the center of the head, not near the top.  It's an easy thing to mess up because there aren't really any visual landmarks above the eyebrows, but there's still a lot of cranium up there which you have to draw.

Here's a link you might find helpful: http://www2.evansville.edu/drawinglab/body.html

Anyway, hope this helped.

EDIT:

Also, with regard to how big your sprite should be, the more important question is how it fits with the background.  Draw a sprite or a background and then figure out the proportions of the other one based on that.

Please modify your posts when no one has posted after you.  It keeps things cleaner and helps save CJ's wallet! - ProgZ

For those of you on a Mac (both of you):

http://www.opensword.org/Pixen/

(Get the latest beta version, though: vast improvement in terms of speed and functionality over version 2.)

Code: ags

Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  _____________
Ã,  Ã,  /Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  . .Ã,  Ã,  Ã, /|
Ã,  Ã, /Ã,  . : .---. . / /Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  .----------------------.
Ã,  /Ã,  Ã, ,Ã,  '==='Ã,  Ã, / /Ã,  Ã, ---/ pip pip jolly goodÃ,  Ã,  Ã, \
Ã, / .Ã,  Ã,  Ã, ..Ã,  Ã,  Ã, / /Ã,  Ã, Ã,  Ã, | this is an exceedinglyÃ,  |
/______________/ /Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  \ tasty personÃ,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, /
|______-/-_____|/Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  `----------------------'
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, /\
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  \ _________________________________
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, |Ã,  aaaaaaaa! help i'm being eaten |
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, |Ã,  by a piece of buttered toastÃ,  Ã, |
Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã,  Ã, '---------------------------------'

ba dum, pshhh!  I'll be here all night.

next: shark infested custard.

Hey Steve, I was just sitting here idly wondering - would you be interested in trying to port the AGS editing system to OS X if you had some help?  I'm not a coding genius by any stretch of the imagination, but dividing and conquering seems to be a good way to go with bigger projects... hehe. 

Here's a question: most of the AGS games I've come across are compiled into a single .EXE installer file. Is there any way to open or extract these on a Mac, so I can get to the actual game .EXE file?

This was also bugging me, and so I did a quick search and found this program, named FileJuicer.  I'm trying it out now.

A couple of quick crits.  There's a note in the third measure of the main synth loop ostinato thing that needs to be changed, which I think is because it clashes with the echoes.  If you put some compression on those drums, bring them back in the mix a bit, and maybe add a low-pass or band-pass filter, that will make them sound a lot less "in-your-face" but will still give them presence.

I would also try bringing the synthesizers higher in the mix, and maybe detuning them a few cents or adding a thin layer of chorus to make them sound warmer and richer.  For the strings (actually, for all the synths), you may want to add a little more wet reverb and turn down the dry signal.

Other than that, I liked it, it's a neat little groove and sounds like it'll fit well into the game.

a partial "arrange-over"

I wasn't quite sure what you were going for here, but I took a stab at re-arranging it anyway.  Hope you don't mind.

The biggest thing to keep in mind here is line.  The rule of thumb for creating melodic lines is that each phrase should use steps along the scale rather than jumps -- save large jumps for dramatic effect, like when the melody reaches its peak.  If you can sing, try singing your lines and you'll see it's a lot easier to sing and remember a part that mostly goes step-by-step up or down the scale.  When your melody is more solid, I think you'll find it clearer what to do with the other parts.  I re-worked the bass line in a few places and added a really crappy harmony line, for an example

I also added a different percussion track which I think helped break up the monotony of the first arrangement a bit.

Anyway, hope this helps.  Lemme know if you have any questions.

The water is kind of meh, but the sky came out pretty well - about 40 minutes work in the GIMP:

I agree that I'm not sure how useful "pure" Terragen would be (unless your whole game is rendered), but I bet it wouldn't be hard to do paintovers of Terragen scenes to make them fit the style.  Maybe I'll try one later on and try to hone my crappy art skills